Two Women Sharing a War: Why Do We Have To Still Keep On Doing This?

For the last several months, I have been corresponding with a woman in North Africa who speaks Turkish, French, Spanish and lastly, the kind of English, she, I suspect, does not dream in. I’ve been told, if you don’t dream in a language, you don’t know it well enough to grasp the intellectual overtones, and under currents and I have found this to be true for my own self. I have dreamt in French, and alas, not understood a single word I listened to in the dream. Almost comic relief, I know. So we are almost, not quite, but almost able to discuss the political issues I know we are both going through. She has exhausted my French, my Turkish is limited to two poets, and so we are stuck with a kind of English that inquires daily about each other. As time goes on, I see we ARE learning to talk deeper and deeper to each other and that feels really good. We both are furious about the way the Palestinians are being treated and I'm married to a Jew and consider myself both Christian and Jewish, practicing the traditions that Y'shua grew up with. And she is a Muslim. The deeper we delve into the outrage and grief we both feel, I can tell the closer we are coming into friendship. I can tell from just the little we have discussed, that this is a anger we both share. She is just as frustrated as I am.

There were a few weeks there when we couldn’t communicate at all, and it wasn’t until this late night that a message came through in French which I often find myself sending on to a friend in Montreal for a translation with some depth, but this one, I could, after a few re-readings, get the gist of, as we say here in America. There is often no explanation for her silences, or at least no explanations she can write down for me. And I worry that much more about them.

But here are two women who long to sit at a small café table on the patio of a North African coffeehouse drinking good thick coffee and discussing our daily lives, our dreams, our inability to reach through that door of language and touch each others’ hearts with our concern.

With men and boys, they can ‘tough it out’, ‘suck it up’ as they say these days, while we women and girls are left stoic, but uneasy inside, fretting about the fact that America has become a third world country, that there are people, not just women anymore, or for the most part, who are tortured, starved, cold, wearing rags and needing medical attention, because of men, whether they be soldiers or not. It is mostly men in congress and they are not voting with humanity in mind it feels to me. It seems to me to be the money game. And my men friends: some of them know exactly what I’m talking about and don’t think I have this hidden agenda of men-hating and others are so impatient with me and ask me when I’m going to get out of the Sixties and stop fighting all the time. I tell them if they think striving every single day for communication between the sexes where at the end of a conversation, there are big smiles and long hugs is fighting, well, I don’t plan on ever stopping. Because I believe in working it through to the bittersweet end. I long for those moments, hours, days and years, oh god yes, give me the years, where men and woman can fight bigotry, poverty, disease and shameful acts of torture on one human being from another until finally these acts are disappeared completely.
My friend is rabid about the Palestinians not having enough to eat or items to stay dry or warm with, and I am that way with my small town and other small towns in American and inner city ghettos, only because I can’t reach out any further than that. The Europeans and Mid-Easterns have an easier job of helping each other in some instances I’ve noticed, because they live so much closer to each other. I saw that when I was reading political poetry in Europe. I could skip out of one coffeehouse and pass through a bar to actually get on a train I wanted to and therefore into another country for another reading if I were willing to travel so light , the heaviest item in my medium-sized backpack would be a seven pound maclap as I call my snow leopard. (We haven’t known each other long enough to introduce each other by name and of course that’s a girl thing to do. My last laptop was named after Don Quixote’s boney horse and when she blew up, I mourned deeply, grateful the week before I had used those little magic sticks to save the tirades and love poems to a nation.) Of course it was a woman who lent me this lovely thin MacBookPro, knowing full well I was going to “shake the dust from my feet, cuz the times, they are a-changin’ and move on, always a column ahead written by someone else about what’s happening in YR neighborhood…

That’s what my friend in North Africa and I do for each other and for the world we hope. We write essays and articles about the outrages we see in other places or in our backyards and how can we change them, and when we see each other getting dark and despondent, we send each other little gifts like Patti Smith singing “Power to the People”, and enclosing a vid of her just reading the words so my friend can understand them better. And she sends me Jacques Brel who I love, shouting out against his war, and it makes us both feel better. We are the cornerstone for each other sometimes without a syllable of language between us. The one or two consonants that get by our ignorance, become our machine guns of poetry and the warmth of our belief in each other, becomes a strong piece of cloth that can be used to do so many things with from drying our asses after bathing, tearing strips for binding wounds, strips for sewing on the rip in jeans, for tying back a braid of hair because the metal on a hair tie can sometimes glisten like a compass to the enemy about our whereabouts. Make no mistake: we use words like bullets. Music is our gun. Poetry is our soup kitchen.